Darren Aranofsky's THE FOUNTAIN is a big stinking movie that is surprisingly brief. It is the type of philosophical postcard that filmmakers don't make very often - 2001 by way of Charlie Kaufman. It's about as accessible to a mass audience as Derrida in the original French, but its rewards are many. You get the sense that the actors (Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz headline, and both are fine) don't really know what's going on, and maybe on some level neither did Aranofsky.

If there's a companion piece to THE FOUNTAIN, it is unfortunately a drizzly little piece of mid-90s filmmaking starring Robin Williams and directed by Bill Forysth called BEING HUMAN. Both sought to ask questions about humanity, love, death, companionship, immortality, etc. on a grand, non-linear scale, but the former had an everyman tone that was painstakingly contrived. That and it was purposely free of a quality we modern movie-goers like to call "entertainment."

I found THE FOUNTAIN very entertaining - for its ambiguities in theme and story. If it is hampered by a low budget and perhaps a smaller scale, it makes up for its largess in ideas. It operates on a keen level of mystery until the very end, and has the courage to leave some of those questions unanswered. It suggests that there is a larger element of transcendence and grace that we would give all eternity to find, though most of us unfortunately have to be jarred by tragedy in order to face this.

I mean, how often is it we see a movie about the tree of life? Modern movies don't take this on a subjects. Modern movies tackle such life-affirming questions as what happens when a kooky Brit pretending to be an ugly foreigner goes to a dinner party and defecates in a bag? And we pat ourselves on the back because we can somehow or another invoke Twain and De Tocqueville in the same sentence as "Borat," when in fact we're giggling about the poop.

THE FOUNTAIN offers no such levity. Aranofsky takes his subject seriously. He hurts for his characters and he's interested in their stories. He longs for transcendence and he's hoping to tap into the a repressed desire we all have for such beauty. As Plato wrote in PHAEDRUS, "he is bursting with passion which he understands not." And I admire Aranofsky for refusing to think such beauty is maudlin or stupid - that the desire for immortality is rooted in nothing less than our desire to become one with the stars in the heavens.

It is a wonderful movie. I hope you'll see it. Bring your patience.